Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Fellowships

The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities is accepting applications for Fellows for the Academic Year 2014-2015. The project will create a digital forum for projects in the Environmental Humanities and will also showcase new student work in an annual gallery exhibit.

Environmental Humanities at Penn

The human species now profoundly shapes the planet and its atmosphere, most significantly via a warming climate with the well-known list of related woes. Natural sciences are no longer distinct from human sciences. Within an ecological system under stress, Environmental Humanities points toward a sustainable future by promoting the kinds of collaborative knowledge production necessary to insure future livability.

PPEH aims to generate knowledge appropriate for this time, which many natural scientists call the Anthropocene, the Age of the Human. Our era of rapid climate change calls for new forms of knowledge creation bridging the sciences and the humanities, the natural world and the human. Penn intends to be among the leaders in this field, and is seeking active engagement from our undergraduate students.

Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowships

Program Fellows will collaborate to build a digital platform to showcase work in this emergent area and to launch a gallery show featuring Environmental Humanities art and literature open to all Penn students and faculty. Specific tasks include:

Critical writing to promote existing work to allow it to reach a broad audience;

Creating new student work to be featured both on the electronic platform and in a curated gallery show on Penn’s campus in April 2015;

Curating student and faculty work for inclusion in the gallery show.

Interest in digital engineering, electronic design, marketing, and/or journalism actively sought. Each fellow will receive a stipend of $500 per semester. A total of seven Fellows will be accepted to the program. The application deadline is Friday, September 26.

The work of artist Bill Burns (his photograph Leather Work Gloves is above), provides a contemporary commentary on environmentalism, including such issues as artificial production and consumerism, and the representation of nature in popular culture.